In the print era, writers often created and published under a pseudonym. That is, they maintained their physical image and wrote under an assumed name.

In the televisual electric age, athletes and other entertainers create and publish under a pseudonimage. That is, they maintain their given names (usually), and play, sing or act under an assumed — or fabricated — physical identity (or image-sign).

In the United States, professional athletes' salaries may legally be amortized by the franchise over the length of the contract, which contributes to a discourse that the athlete is simply a capital asset, or a factor of production necessary to produce goods — in the case of sport, the information and image-signs necessary to support the sportocracy. However, what is interesting is that these factors of production are embodied by the athletes; they may be rented but never sold, and therefore can never technically be owned, since the embodiment implies non-transferability.

Paul Fussell, in his appropriately-titled book Uniforms (2002), notes that:

"Uniforms divide into two rough categories: honorific and stigmatic. Honorific: the attire of police, McDonald's fast-food servers, United States Marines, the clergy. Stigmatic: the orange coveralls worn by prisoners, widely familiarized by the dress of Timothy McVeigh as depicted in a TV clip repeatedly shown after his arrest" (p. 121).

Obviously, the days of Fussell being a teenager are long in the past, as the McDonald's uniform is anything but honorific among the teen set. It is laughable for those outside the subculture of employees, and a yoke for those within — sort of like the definition of "stigmatic".

Despite this, he raises some interesting questions about uniforms as image-signs, or as means of communication: What happens when this extension of the skin is standardized (lest we forget that McLuhan identified clothing as an extension of the skin)? Is cheering against another's uniform a type of racism? What can we infer about the sporting goods oxymoron "authentic replica" and the replication (or cloning) of sports fan(atics) worldwide? What are the tribalist image-signs that these uniforms represent?

To fully answer these questions and others requires an examination of the interplay between the three groups that are the de facto stakeholders of the uniform: those who dictate the parameters of the uniform, those who wear the uniform and physically produce its meaning, and those who view or consume the uniform. But one thing is certain: as an extension of the skin imbued with such explosive meaning, uniforms are as much a Foucaultian disciplinary technology as the control of space, time or modality of movement.

The sport stadium of today is often characterized as a television studio, but the more appropriate metaphor would be that of the assembly line factory, for professional sport is nothing more than the Fordist production of information, in which athletes toil daily in concert with technology to produce a steady supply of raw information that is then used as inputs to produce more highly-refined media products. The only difference between a professional sports stadium and an automobile factory is that people are willing to pay good money to watch the automated production process in the former case.

Sound weird?

Consider a fast-food joint such as McDonald's or Subway: we almost totally see the automated production process at work; in fact, we want to see the product being made, and even what we can't see, we have the illusion of seeing. The production of fast-food, and the cyborgian labour involved in the process, allows for the creation of the image-sign that is the fast-food brand: the standardized burger product, delivered within five minutes, and with a smile, is what allows the golden arches to become such a valuable image-sign for McDonald's. The same principle is at work for professional sport: the cyborgian production of sports information allows for the creation of the image-sign that is the NBA logo, or the Nike Swoosh, or the ESPN acronym.

Nope … except for uncertainty. Uncertainty is what we come to see in a sporting contest, despite our preoccupation with sports information. Uncertainty, though underemphasized by the sportocracy, is human. Uncertainty is what makes the factory a stage, though a stage of improvisation rather than one of script.

Repression does not target original thought. It targets already established heretical movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality.

Chandler Davis

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

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for June, 2003.
sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.